Illustration by Jess Kuhn
I wonder if all natives of this place feel, as I do, the bifurcation of St. Louis, the invisible yet palpable suture line that divides the city from the county. Does everyone feel that internal click of transition while passing over the River Des Peres on Highway 44 or 55? Does driving along Skinker Boulevard give others a vertiginous sensation of walking a tightrope between two distinct dimensions?
Perhaps I'm exaggerating, but it's undeniable that St. Louisans belong to a broken family, divorced long ago, the wounds healed over incompletely, the loyalties divided. Grandparents grew up on one side, then moved over to the other in the '50s. They talk of the old neighborhood wistfully, with equal measures of schadenfreude and guilt. Grandkids move back, attracted by the restaurants or the relatively inexpensive housing stock. When their kids attain school age, maybe they'll move back over the line. Or maybe not. In either case, the line is there. "Which side are you on?" it asks.
I grew up in the county, near the intersection of Watson and Lindbergh. But in my earliest memories, there was the trip into the city, a place different in ways a child could feel, if not articulate. My maternal grandparents lived in a tall, old frame house down Portis Avenue, near the train tracks behind what's now the Kingshighway Home Depot.
My family owned a red pickup truck, and I remember sitting on the passengerside floor, peering into the air-conditioning ducts as we rode the familiar route along Highway 44, past the cylindrical framework of the gas storage tanks in Shrewsbury, then over the River Des Peres. The Gateway Arch would come into view shortly before we got off at Kingshighway, by the factory (gone now) where they made the R&F spaghetti noodles we had in the pantry.
The old house was full of mysterious rooms I wasn't allowed to explore, and the neighborhood held mysteries, too—Tower Grove Park, which we passed but never entered, and the church where my parents had been married, Holy Innocents, so vaulted and old-fashioned compared to my own '60s-era parish church. The city felt different: older, realer, more alive to me as a kid, and I treasured as a pilgrimage that drive down 44.
It wasn't until adolescence that I realized you could take Watson there, too. That delayed understanding had to do with immaturity, I think. One mark of my adulthood in St. Louis was my development of a coherent mental map of the area. But my confused child's geography also suggests how dominated our metropolitan landscape is by highway logic, how fragmented our sense of metropolitan connectedness.
My mom's mom died in 1982. I remember standing in our driveway when my mom pulled in, back from the city, the hospital, her eyes red and raw, bearing terrible news. Her dad died a few years later. The house on Portis was sold, and I lost, for a time, that personal connection to the city. We drove cityward on 44 only for Cardinals games or the VP Fair. We took Watson only as far as Ted Drewes.
I chose to attend a Jesuit high school in the city, it seems to me now, mostly for the opportunity to take that drive again daily. Quickly, though, I realized that the drive was not enough to satisfy my desire to spend time in this alternate urban reality. When I inherited our family's 1981 Toyota Corolla and began driving a carpool myself, I devised and adopted all sorts of alternate routes in order to savor the streets and sights of this twin city that to me was somehow also an older, wiser sibling. During a few spare hours between dismissal on a half day and 3 p.m. track practice, a friend and I explored downtown: talking with homeless men at the central library, parking the car north of the Landing and throwing rocks into the river, quoting from Hamlet (which we were reading in English class at the time) with charred wood on a concrete flood wall: What is this quintessence of dust?
Pretentious? Guilty as charged. But after graduating from SLUH to SLU, I moved into that twin city and, except for summers during college, have lived here ever since.
These borderlines, over the course of a lifetime, take on more than a municipal significance. They can mark the crossings between childhood and adulthood, between one life and the next.
It was the fall of 1995, and I was a sophomore at SLU. I was reading in my dorm room on the evening of September 15 when my sister called. My mom was having trouble breathing. The cancer had spread to her brain earlier that year. I ran down the hall, down five flights of stairs, not wanting to wait for the elevator. The Corolla was in the parking lot, and I gunned it up Laclede, to Grand, to 44. Driving that highway again in the dark, I thought of all the times I'd taken this trip before, and how none of them had been remotely like this. I didn't think about the border between the city and county then; I was crossing over a different threshold, one from which there'd be no going back. I pulled into the driveway, came in through the garage, opened the door to the kitchen, and stepped into a different life.
It was a different life that I drove into, three times, as my wife and I took each of our daughters home from the hospital in the county where they were born. Traveling down Highway 40, getting on at Ballas and exiting at Kingshighway, I didn't think of the crossing as a kind of baptism for them, an initiation into the place where they'll be spending their childhoods. And yet, with each of my daughters, there was a kind of blessing upon arrival in the city, in the form of gifts from our neighbors: an infant-sized Imo's shirt (from a neighbor who operates several franchises); homemade cupcakes, labeled "Baby 1," "Baby 2," and "Baby ?"; and the makings of lunch, with bread, meat, and olive salad from The Hill.
One day this past summer, I was driving on Manchester under the MetroLink tracks near Hanley. The Maplewood sign on the overpass, I noticed, reads backward on the east side and forward on the west. So it makes sense, both head-on and in the rearview, only as you drive toward the city. Considering the path my life has taken, that seemed right to me.
But that's just me. For others, the path that makes sense may lead from south St. Louis to Kirkwood; from North County to O'Fallon; from Brentwood to Sunset Hills. Each move takes one across the network of lines we've drawn to divide me from you and us from them.
Someday, conceivably, the balance of power and the distribution of resources could shift enough that the city and the county will patch things up and reunite. It probably wouldn't solve all our problems, but for me at least there'd be an emotional difference, a psychological relief in the absence of that little hiccup as one crosses over the city-county line. A political reunification would make me feel that, no matter which side of the line I've moved to, my life is still grounded in my hometown. And there'd be a pleasure—and a strength—in thinking that, at least on some level, we who call ourselves St. Louisans are all in this together.
Frank Kovarik teaches English at St. Louis University High School and lives with his wife and three daughters in the Tower Grove neighborhood. His last article for St. Louis Magazine, "Mapping the Divide," appeared in our December 2008 issue.
